American Journeys

American Journeys

Only in America - the most powerful democracy on earth, home to the best and worst of everything - are the most extreme contradictions possible. In a series of journeys, acclaimed author Don Watson set out to explore the nation that has influenced him more than any other.

Travelling by rail gave Watson a unique and seductive means of peering into the United States, a way to experience life with its citizens: long days with the American landscape and American towns and American history unfolding on the outside, while inside a tiny particle of the American people talked among themselves.

Watson’s experiences are profoundly affecting: he witnesses the terrible aftermath of Hurricane; explores the savage history of the Deep South, the heartland of the Civil War; and journeys to the remarkable wilderness of Yellowstone National Park. Yet it is through the people he meets that Watson discovers the incomparable genius of America, its optimism, sophistication and riches - and also its darker side, its disavowal of failure and uncertainty.

Beautifully written, with gentle power and sly humour, American Journeys investigates the meaning of the United States: its confidence, its religion, its heroes, its violence, and its material obsessions. The things that make America great are also its greatest flaws.

Review

by Mark Rubbo, Managing Director of Readings

American Journeys is a very, very fine book. In 2005, Watson spent almost
six months on and off criss-crossing America, across the Amtrak tracks and
its roads and highways. Watson’s America is not the America of Hollywood or
The New York Review of Books, but the America where Matt Austin, who rides
bulls, thanks the Lord each time he gets on and drops to his knees to praise
the Lord when he survives. It’s the land of microwave bagel and cream cheese
or the Whataburger. It’s a land of contradictions; a scientific powerhouse
where the advocates of Intelligent Design are actually taken seriously.

Watson starts his trip in New Orleans, six months after Hurricane Katrina, a
black working-class city devastated and left to rot by government ineptitude
a symbol of an incipient racism. Watson is the inveterate sticky beak,
eavesdropping on conversations, observing, asking questions of the ordinary
people that he encounters.

America was where Timothy McVeigh detonated a bomb under a government
building, killing 168 people and injuring 800 to ‘put a check on government
abuse of power’. At a truck stop, Watson meets a chap who, for $500, helps
truck drivers bypass the device that limits their speed.

For many of us America is in our imagination; a subliminal message that we
can’t escape from. As Watson drives into Oklahoma, the words on the songs
start sweeping into his head, and the refrain of Oh What a Beautiful Morning
sounds around him. Why, Watson wonders, did the songs and images first heard
as a child stick in his mind and come flooding back so easily? The same
happens in San Antonio, home to the Alamo, ageing back to the childhood of
Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier. Watson’s experiences of America
speak to all of us.

Yet, these familiar and strangely comforting images sit awkwardly against
the encounter in a diner in Mississippi, where Watson overhears an old black
man telling his younger companion about'the plan that the Lord has for us',
speaking in the manner in which we might talk about an impending holiday or
our superannuation; after a while a young waitress animatedly joins in the
discussion. Watson shows us that America definitely is another country.

Many readers know Watson as Paul Keating’s speechwriter and through his two
books on corporate language, but he is an historian by training and his
American observations segue into absolutely fascinating historical
ruminations. Above all, he is a master of language: ‘Downtown Chicago is so
clean. Not a crust, or a butt or a bubblegum wrapper. You could eat a Krispy
Kreme right off the street.’

As I said before, this is a very, very fine book. Do yourself a favour -
read it … better still, buy it!